Over the last few months Halton & St Helens VCA has been working with colleagues from Halton Borough Council (under the banner of One Halton Together) on a project which has engaged volunteers to provide support for shielding individuals with shopping, dog walking and wellbeing calls.

Over 1,200 residents from Halton & St Helens signed up via our new Volunteer Portal and were able to put themselves forwards for individual voluntary opportunities posted on our Covid 19 Community Tasks page. The VCA has received over 300 email referrals from the Contact Centre and has posted over 160 voluntary opportunities on the portal. Over 90% of the opportunities were completed within four hours of being posted meaning that nearly all the residents who asked for help received it the very same day.

"We couldn't have delivered this project without our incredible team of volunteers," said Sally Yeoman, Chief Officer at Halton & St Helens VCA. "It's been inspiring seeing how quickly they've responded to the opportunity to help people in their community."

One resident e-mailed in to say "My wife and I would like to put on record our most sincere and heartfelt thanks to the volunteer lady who did our shopping for us at Tesco today. Everything was exactly what we had asked for. Please also thank the organisers of this volunteer shopping service."

Find out more at www.volunteering.haltonsthelensvca.org.uk To hear volunteers talk about why they joined the project and the positive impact it's had on them, you can listen to the VCA podcast here: https://vcaradio.com/2020/06/03/volunteers-week-2020-covid-19-volunteers/